1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to clamping devices and, more specifically, to a versatile clamp for mounting of a variety of storage accessories to furniture articles.
2. Background of the Invention
The advent of ready-to-assemble ("RTA") furniture revolutionized the furniture industry in the last decade. Kits including wood or fiber board panels and fasteners provide easy to assemble furniture articles, such as desks, shelving units, and cabinets. These RTA furniture articles are used increasingly in home offices or in cubicle-type office settings due to their ease of installation, aesthetics, and comparatively low cost. Many such RTA furniture items are used for housing home or office computers or stereo equipment, or organizing papers and files.
Computers present unique organizational challenges to their users, due to the large number of accessories and peripherals used with a computer, such as a mouse, computer floppy disks, CD-ROM disks, and associated cables. It would be desirable for furniture articles to be easily adapted to include convenient means for storing these and other objects within easy reach of a user, but also in a neat, organized, aesthetic manner.
While there have been attempts to provide clamps for mounting organizational and storage accessories (for convenience, the terms organizational and storage are used interchangeably herein) to furniture articles, none of these attempts provide adequate versatility to accommodate a wide variety of storage accessories. Prior art clamps also have at most only one interface means to accommodate accessories. The versatility of a clamp can be greatly increased by providing multiple accessory interface means.
Many prior art clamps, such as that shown in Hopwood, U.S. Pat. No. 5,549,268, utilize coiled springs to bias the jaws of the clamp toward a closed position. Because such clamps are self-closing, they present a problem of premature closing. It is not uncommon for users to get their fingers caught in the clamp jaws while attempting to secure the clamp onto a surface. It is therefore desirable for a clamp to be equipped with means for the user to more easily control the opening and closing of the clamp jaws.
Another drawback of prior art clamps is that the coiled springs typically have one or more sharp ends that are exposed. A user could scratch his or her skin, or clothing could get caught on these exposed sharp ends. Yet another drawback of these prior art spring clamps is that the user has no control over the clamping force. Instead, the stiffness of the spring causes a restoring force to bias the jaws of the spring toward a closed position. If the restoring force is too strong, there is a possibility of degradation of the surfaces to which the clamp is secured.
A corollary problem associated with such prior art spring clamps is that the more stiff the spring, the more force that is required for the user to open the jaws of the clam in order to release it. These clamps are particularly problematic for persons of modest strength, who may have difficulty overcoming the restoring force to open the clamp jaws. It would therefore be desirable to have a clamp that has jaws which a user could easily open and close, and that the clamp have an internal, unexposed mechanism. It would further be desirable for such a clamp to have a tightness that is user-adjustable, so that the user could set the amount of force with which to close the jaws onto surfaces such as panels of furniture articles, and thereby avoid degradation of the panel surfaces.
It would also be desirable for a clamp to be easily coupled with a variety of different types of interchangeable accessories, so that a single clamp could be used to secure an entire product line of accessories to RTA furniture or elsewhere. Likewise, it would be desirable for the clamp to have accessory interface means wherein uncoupling or disengaging storage accessories from the clamp is easy and does not require excessive force. Another beneficial feature would be for the clamp to provide the user with both a tactile and audible means for determining when the clamp is adequately secured to a given accessory, such that the given accessory will not become prematurely disengaged from the clamp when the clamp is mounted to a panel of RTA furniture, for example.
The manner in which the present invention overcomes these and other shortcomings of the prior art will become clear in the following Summary of the Invention, the Detailed Description of the Preferred Embodiment, and the drawings.